The New Jersey Star-Ledger launched a thousand memes on Sunday with its aerial photos of Mr. Christie sunbathing on a state beach he had ordered closed amid a budget standoff.

On Saturday Mr. Christie was asked whether he thought it was fair that he’d join his family at the beach house the state provides for the governor in Island Beach State Park, while constituent holiday-goers were turned away.

Mr. Christie offered a Marie Antoinette rejoinder: “Run for governor, and you can have a residence there.”

He returned from the beach house on Sunday for a news conference about the government shutdown that closed the beach, among other things. Asked whether he’d caught any rays, Mr. Christie said, “I didn’t get any sun today.”

But earlier that afternoon, The New Jersey Star-Ledger had put a photographer in a plane that flew over the beach and immortalized the Christie family vacation, including the now-ubiquitous shot of the governor splayed out in a lawn chair.

After news of the photos surfaced, Brian Murray, a spokesman for Mr. Christie, airbrushed the governor’s fib, saying he said he didn’t get any sun because “he had a baseball hat on.”

The Star-Ledger ran a front page photo of Mr. Christie & Co. on the vast and otherwise unpopulated swath of sand, with the headline “Gov. Soaks Up Sun on Beach He Closed,” including an online photo gallery showing packed beaches elsewhere, and park officers turning non-gubernatorial beachgoers away. Irate Garden Staters and Twitter users around the country mocked the bronzed and hapless Mr. Christie.

In a local television interview, the governor thumbed his nose at The Star-Ledger: “I’m sure they’re going to get a Pulitzer Prize for this one.”

Fueling the ire was the sense that Mr. Christie, his presidential ambitions thwarted and his approval rating hovering between 15 and 20 percent, simply doesn’t care about appearances anymore. Sunday’s events made it even harder to recall that Mr. Christie made his political name “down the shore” in 2012, working to help communities recover from Hurricane Sandy.

It surprised Andy Mills, the Star-Ledger photographer, that Mr. Christie fudged about his beach day, since he seemed to know he’d been busted. “I’ve successfully hunted fugitives out of the country. I’ve caught alleged criminals trying to sneak out back doors of their homes or into back doors of courthouses,” he wrote. “Most of the time, I get the shots and make a clean getaway.”

But this time, “Christie looks me dead in the eye. He has to know what’s happening. Why else would a plane make two passes over his private beach party when there’s no one else around?”